‘Kennedy’ Review: Rahul Bhat Anchors Anurag Kashyap’s Bleak, Brooding Thriller

Brooding, violent and steeped in moral decay, Kennedy arrives not as a routine streaming release but as a long-delayed reckoning.

After premiering to a thunderous reception at the Cannes Film Festival and drifting through international festivals for nearly three years, the film finally finds its audience on ZEE5. The wait has only deepened its mystique. What unfolds is less a conventional crime thriller and more a psychological excavation of guilt, power and institutional rot.

Directed by Anurag Kashyap, the film is set against a pandemic-silenced Mumbai. The city appears spectral — empty roads, masked faces, the hum of televised panic in the background. Kashyap transforms lockdown into texture and tension, using stillness as a weapon. The film opens with deliberate calm but gradually intensifies, morphing into a disturbing meditation on violence and complicity. It borrows the grammar of noir but refuses to be confined by it.

At the centre stands Kennedy, portrayed with extraordinary restraint by Rahul Bhat in what is arguably his finest performance to date. Kennedy is the alias of Uday Shetty, a once-idealistic police officer undone by a fatal mistake during an interrogation. Public outrage brands him a “killer cop.” Personal tragedy soon follows, pushing him further into emotional exile. With the help of Police Commissioner Rasheed Khan — chillingly embodied by Mohit Takalkar — Uday disappears and is reborn as a covert executioner serving the very system that discarded him.

Kennedy operates in the shadows, eliminating targets with cold precision while living as an insomniac cab driver by night. His violence is disturbingly efficient, stripped of theatrics. The pandemic backdrop amplifies the moral vacuum: corruption no longer hides behind bureaucracy; it operates brazenly, like organised crime in uniform. The police hierarchy resembles a cartel scrambling to maintain influence in a world where old channels of power are drying up.

The narrative gains emotional texture with Charlie, played by Sunny Leone, who delivers one of her most nuanced performances. Introduced as a bargaining chip in a corrupt exchange, Charlie gradually becomes a mirror to Kennedy’s fractured psyche. Her vulnerability, laced with quiet resilience, offers fleeting glimpses of redemption — though the film remains sceptical of easy salvation.

Kashyap’s political commentary is woven subtly through conversations and atmosphere. References to performative pandemic rituals, media sensationalism and the invisible influence of powerful elites suggest a society numbed to spectacle and suffering. The critique never feels didactic; it seeps in through tone and implication.

Visually, the film is drenched in shadow and neon, evoking the aesthetic of a graphic novel brought to life. The score fuses operatic intensity with jazz undertones, building toward a prolonged orchestral crescendo that mirrors Kennedy’s psychological collapse. The climax denies catharsis, cutting to black at a moment of unbearable tension and forcing viewers to sit with ambiguity.

What ultimately anchors the film is Bhat’s performance. His heavy gait, hollow stare and measured dialogue convey trauma without melodrama. He resists the urge to soften Kennedy, allowing the character to remain unsettlingly opaque. The audience may recoil from his actions, yet the film compels an understanding of the forces that shaped him.

Imperfect in pacing yet uncompromising in vision, Kennedy stands as one of Kashyap’s most haunting works. It is a crime drama, a political lament and a character study rolled into one — a film that lingers like an unresolved echo long after the final frame fades.